Second Wave of Protests Unleashed: Targets the Federal Reserve

Wall Street Protesters Target the Federal Reserve
The “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have targeted the Federal Reserve as one of their central platforms.

The “Occupy San Francisco” branch of the protests is taking place – not in the Financial District, where the big banks are located – but in front of the San Francisco Federal Reserve bank.

High-Level Economists, Congressmen and Many Americans Want to End the Fed
This is not as radical and controversial as it might appear at first blush.

High-level economists support the Occupy Wall Street protests. And some very well-known economists also support ending the Fed.

For example, Milton Friedman said:

This evidence persuades me that at least a third of the price rise during and just after World War I is attributable to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System… and that the severity of each of the major contractions — 1920-1, 1929-33 and 1937-8 is directly attributable to acts of commission and omission by the Reserve authorities…

Any system which gives so much power and so much discretion to a few men, [so] that mistakes — excusable or not — can have such far reaching effects, is a bad system. It is a bad system to believers in freedom just because it gives a few men such power without any effective check by the body politic — this is the key political argument against an independent central bank…

To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is much too serious a matter to be left to the central bankers.

Austrian economists such as Murray Rothbard also would like to end the Fed: